The University of the Philippines (UP) College of Music ends its faculty concert series, First Semester of Academic Year 2014-2015, with a jazz arrangement of beloved Handel’s Messiah done by Krina Cayabyab, with translation in Tagalog by famed poet laureate of the Philippines, Pete Lacaba. The concert will be done on 5 December 2015, 6:30 PM on the steps facing the amphitheater beside Quezon Hall–the administrative center of UP Diliman–as a way of celebrating the last day of classes in the said campus and ushering in the festive Christmas season. The first of its kind in the history of Philippine music, Jazz Messiah in Tagalog, innovates tradition with a view to futurity in which world local cultures combine in a spirit of cosmopolitanism.

The event will feature Prof. Rayben Maigue’s well-known UP Jazz Band accompanying the famous choirs of UP Diliman such as Philippine Madrigal Singers (Mark Carpio, director), UP Concert Chorus (Jai Sabas-Aracama, who is the main choirmaster of the event), UP Singing Ambassadors (Ed Manguiat, conductor), and UP Staff Chorale (Chris Reyes, director). Each of these choirs will render two Christmas songs in the first part of the show, which is free to the public.

Translating this musical masterpiece by Handel, which comes from mid-18th century into 21st century popular music and language comes as a way of paying homage to art as well as destabilizing the myth of authenticity that has generated many inter-ethnic conflicts around the world. By situating an expression that sits comfortably both *inside and outside cultural-linguistic particularities,* the College and the university hope to convey a message that beyond cultural borders, a heterogenous social world harmony is achievable if alternative voices–jazz and Tagalog–are heard in the global ecumenic.

The evolution of music for a million years has witnessed how music has been one of the most potent symbols in human behavior, fostering solidarities that are necessary for human adaptation and survival. In an interconnected world, this is the way to go: Local!

The 3rd National Conference on Sport Pedagogy will be held at the University of the Philippines, Diliman from November 7-9, 2014. This year’s conference aims to encourage participants to initiate research in their respective fields and in their locales to contribute to the body of knowledge generated in the practice of Physical Education and Sport Science with the theme: “Best Practices in Movement Education to Develop Champions for Life.”

The conference aims to gather together physical education and sport science teachers, researchers, coaches, fitness instructors, athletes and students from all over the country. This year’s conference will feature international keynote speakers who will share their knowledge on best practices in movement education geared towards the holistic development of the youth. We will also be maintaining the workshops on the different activities in sports, dance, fitness, and athletic training as well as the research paper presentations of practitioners in the field of physical education and sports science.

The NCSP is an annual event by the U.P. College of Human Kinetics. The NCSP brings together professionals in Human Movement Sciences and provides a venue for continuing education, personal enrichment and professional collaboration. It aims to uplift the standards of the profession of Physical Education teachers, Sports Science practitioners, Coaches, Fitness and Dance Professionals. and ultimately, empower attendees in being advocates of lifetime physical activity involvement, fitness and wellness.

ICSME 2014 aims to provide a venue for sharing research, best practices, and innovations among science and mathematics teachers, educators, and administrators in order to implement, support, and sustain science and mathematics curriculum reform. The conference will also promote the exchange of ideas about continuing professional development as a means of raising the capacities of science and mathematics teachers.

The Institute for Maritime and Ocean Affairs, UP Asian Center, Institute for Maritime Affairs and Law of the Sea, the University of the Philippines Alumni Association and the University of the Philippines present a cartographic exhibit titled Historical Truths and Lies: Scarborough Shoal in Ancient Maps to be held from October 23 to November 14, 2014 at the GT-Toyota Asian Cultural Center. The opening ceremony features a lecture by Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice Antonio T. Carpio, to be held on October 23, at 1:30 PM. On October 28, 2014, there will be a UP Alumni Association Kapihan with Department of Foreign Affairs Assistant Secretary Charles C. Jose at 3:00 p.m.

In this lecture, Prof. Garcia will “examine the idea and practice of myth in the various ways that comparative religious studies, psychology, and contemporary critical theory have defined (or appropriated) it, paying close attention to how myth has come to function as an inexhaustible source into which both artistic creativity and rational reflection now and again dip their fevered hands.”

The lecture is borne out of a semester-long “special problems” graduate course that Prof. Garcia has been teaching in UP Diliman. The lecture will conclude with a reading of some of Prof. Garcia’s own lyric “retellings” of some well-known (and -loved) mythic stories.

What’s great about teaching in UP Diliman—among so many wonderful things, like the verdant canopies with their exotic birds, the brilliant and passionate conversations at just about any corner of the sprawling campus, the living tradition of national service, and the brightest students—is that the university’s foremost theater company, Dulaang UP, semester after semester, offers the most interesting and intelligent productions, that can certainly complement any number of the university’s courses in literary, historical, communication, performance, and cultural studies, for they can occasion reflections (or even debates) on any of their routine lessons…

Floy Quintos’ latest play, ‘Ang Huling Lagda ni Apolinario Mabini,’ pursues his well-known passion for musical theater and historical drama, and in collaboration with composer Krina Cayabyab, and under the superb direction of Dexter Santos, his wonderfully realized play that is still showing in the Wilfrido Maria Guerrero theater of UP Diliman proves to be entirely watchable and satisfying, even if, now and then, the music and the singing don’t exactly produce the kind of felicitous sound that they should, owing perhaps to any number of reasons (logistical, acoustical, the mismatch between tessituras and the songs’ melodic ranges, the luck of the draw, etc.) …

One suspects, however, that imposing the musical form on this dramatic vision may not have been necessary, or desirable, inasmuch as the best scenes are really the non-musical ones, especially the central dramatic moment, when the American governor general and the sublime paralytic meet and argue on the dock of the boat that is bringing the exiled ‘brains of the revolution’ back to his homeland, accompanied by his devoted younger brother and the feisty General Ricarte. This encounter almost certainly took place, and its central facts very likely were the historical case, but in these scenes Quintos obviously exercises his artistic license to ennoble and illuminate this pivotal ‘event,’ thereby gifting to the audience his own insight concerning the vital question of why, after valiantly resisting for so long, the old and infirm Mabini finally relented and signed the oath of allegiance to the United States, that had already effectively (and brutally) annexed his beloved and wobegone country, after all.

As Quintos would have it, Mabini right at that moment must have realized, with the aid of the fictionalized figure of the kindly Filipina nurse Salud, that the dream of an emancipated Filipino nation rightfully belonged to the future generations of his countrymen and women, to whom he had already bequeathed the seed of his own life’s sacred scripture. This idea—that it was not his actions but rather his writings that would constitute his truest and most enduring contribution to the dream of nationhood—proves entirely fortuitous, not only because even Rizal’s ‘greatness’ itself is in a large part textual (novelistic, to be exact), but also because before it can be anything else, the Filipino nation must be a stable allegorical narrative, a powerfully enacted story with its set of cosmologizing symbols that can gather together the embodied and parlous differences of our country into the provisional and archipelagic unity that lies at the heart of this imagined community. It’s additionally interesting that Quintos’ play renders the act of signing—of textual self-inscription—as the most important dramatic gesture, because it’s precisely the transition from the oral to the chirographic that defined the modern project of state-formation, both for the colonized subjects and their colonizers, especially in this part of the subjugated world…

Finally, UP’s resident historians will most likely appreciate this play differently from its artists, but that’s because their task is to demystify what the latter, by definition, must again and again summon forth: resonant, inspiring, and enduring stories or myths, which are really what writers (and artists in general) all aspire to achieve, disseminate, and leave behind…

In any case, just as one stands up to give the crew and cast (top-billed by the amazing Camanag and Gatmaitan, and of course, the splendid Miclat-Janssen) their hearty and well-deserved ovation—along with the rest of the house—one finds oneself remembering why exactly one required this play of one’s young students in postcolonial discourse: so that they may experience for themselves the nativism (in this fractious subject, a much-encountered and contentious notion) that still must inform and impel all our institutional attempts at re-imagining and reclaiming our past as a people, but also so that they may recognize nativism’s affective viability, power, and ‘richness’ when deployed in the arts, as well as its sad inadequacy and impoverishment as a form of historical analysis…

Please join us UP College of Music this month, affirming our commitment to academic life.

October 10, 2:30-4Pm. Dr. William Summers of Dartmouth College will share his research findings on the music-culture of late 19th century Manila. Patricipants are requested to read Dr. Summers’ works-in-progress, which are available for free from the office of URA Josie Baradas. This event is designed to appreciate current research in historical musicology and benchmarks international standards in humanities writing. Admission is free.

Music lovers in Manila will have a rare opportunity to listen to José A. Estella’s other “Ang Maya” songs that have been specially arranged by Chris Borela for the UP Madrigal Singers concerts on 9 and 10 October, 2014, 6:30PM, Abelardo Hall Auditorium, Quezon City. Dubbed “Panorama,” the concerts on the theme of picturesque music will be directed by Mark Carpio, as part of the College’s on-going faculty concert series. Mark Carpio is one of the best choral directors the Philippines has ever known.

José A. Estella (1870-1943) was a Spanish insular, a creollo, a Filipino composer who was not a mere gig musician who composed waltzes but an important public intellectual who filipinized Spanish zarzuelas from 1890s to 1900s and a nationalist artist who asserted the beauty of Philippine folk songs and dances in his large works such as Cancionero Filipino, Filipinas Symphony (1928), the first symphony written by a Filipino, Ultimo Adios (symphonic ode), and the opera Lakambini (Maiden). These works are all preserved in a collection that Estella’s granddaughter, Mrs. Mariles Teotico had donated to UP Music Library in April 2014. The scope of preserved music manuscripts and prints in the Estella collection is unique for it chronicles a wide time period (late 1880s to 1938), the cultural history of which is yet to be written. Practically all of José Estella’s music creations–arrangements, transcriptions, and original compositions based on Cebuano balitaw, Hiligaynon Lulay, Tagalog auit and condiman, Waray Curacha–are intact in this collection having been safeguarded from the many wars (1896 revolution, 1898 Filipino-American war, and 1945 Liberation of Manila from the Japanese) that were a prelude to the first Philippine Republic in 1946.

The “Ang Maya” waltz was a piece in Estella’s 1905 sarsuwela–with Severino Reyes as librettist– Filipinas para los Filipinos, which critiqued the racist bill forbidding Filipino men to marry American women, a double-standard in colonial policy. “Maya” is rice bird, a typical object in Philippine landscape. Estella consciously represented the everyday life of common tao in the Philippines, thus predating some works by composers who graduated from UP Conservatory of Music in 1920s.

Tickets are at 500 pesos each, with discounts to students and senior citizens. For details, please contact the UP College of Music (02) 926.0026.

LAÓN-LAÓN Forum, Conference-Workshop on Preservation of Music Heritage in Asia

The University of the Philippines College of Music and the UP Center for Ethnomusicology invite you to the LAÓN-LAÓN Forum and Conference-Workshop on Preservation of Music Heritage in Asia on October 14-18, 2014 at the University of the Philippines Diliman, Commonwealth Avenue, Diliman, Quezon City 1101, Philippines. For more information, visit http://upethnom.com/index.php?page=500.

THIS September, the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the University of the Philippines Diliman College of Music present the Philippine premiere of Antonin Dvorak’s Rusalka: A Lyric Fairy Tale Opera on September 11-12 at the CCP Tanghalang Aurelio Tolentino and September 23-24 at the UP Abelardo Hall.

The full-length show will feature some of the best talents in the country. Notable performers are 2013 Aliw Awardee Fame Flores and Philippine Madrigal Singers member Bianca Camille Lopez, both portraying the main character Rusalka; Tenors Malvin Macasaet and Christian Nagano, both playing the Prince; and other cast members are from the University of the Philippines and University of Santo Tomas. The opera’s artistic director is Prof. Alegria Ferrer, and the conductor is Maestro Chino Toledo.

Our Rusalka is dedicated to nationalist intellectual Isabelo de los Reyes, whose 150th birth centenary is being celebrated this year. The opera also closes the 50th anniversary of Abelardo Hall Auditorium in Diliman campus on Sept 24.

For inquiries, contact UP College of Music at Telephone no.: 926-0026, Trunkline: 981-8500 (local 2629, 2639) and look for Ms. Eva or email: [email protected]or call the CCP Box Office at 832-3704.

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September 13, 2014 – UPSOLAIR

Labour market flexibility in the context of development: A comparative analysis of Brazil, India and China

a public lecture by Professor Anil Verma, University of Toronto, in celebration of the 60th founding anniversary of the UP School of Labor and Industrial Relations and the 150th birth anniversary of Isabelo de los Reyes. Reactions from Dr. Rene E. Ofreneo Dean Jonathan P. Sale and open forum to follow. Read more click here.

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UP celebrates 150th year of Mabini, Delos Reyes in September

Apolinario Mabini and Isabelo de los Reyes have one thing in common – both of them will celebrate their 150th birth anniversaries this year.Mabini, the “Brains of the Revolution,” was one of the country’s most important intellectuals during the country’s revolutionary period. De los Reyes, the “Father of Filipino Socialism,” was a journalist, folklorist, politician, and labor activist.To celebrate their lives and legacies, the international and interdisicplinary conference titled “Intellectuals, the Public Arena, and the Nation,” will be held from September 22 to 24 at the College of Arts and Letters Auditorium, University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines. Read more click here.